A this article appears in Playing with words: The Spoken Word in Artistic Practice Edited by Cathy Lane

A collection of responses from over 40 leading contemporary composers and artists who were invited to represent aspects of their creative practice with words, and in particular, the spoken word, for the printed page.

The book concentrates on the kinds of creative play to be found in different sound based genres such as electroacoustic music composition, text sound composition, and sound poetry while reflecting artistic practices in disciplines of such as digital arts, electronic, concrete and experimental poetry, performance art and fine art.

The contributors have chosen to represent their work in a variety of different ways which include writing, graphics, poetry, photographs and through interview.

Playing with Words is designed by Colin Sackett and published by CRiSAP in collaboration with RGAP.

Work Details
A sound composition created for a multi-channel performance/installation which took place over three weeks in the Bargehouse Gallery. Visitors were asked to remove their shoes, and led into a darkened environment by candle light. The single female performer guided visitors through a multisensory immersive environment.

Taking a small audience through an experience and back to its beginning. The fragmented story conjures dreamlike images and situations that enthrall and the audience is magically drawn into the scene.

The piece deals with the themes of refinding childhood, and asking basic questions, inspiring the imagination of the audience. Taking them through a close, intimate, almost personal experience. Coming close, leading the audience around not just by touch, but also sound, smell and taste. A gentle path where they can focus on small things, and perhaps refind a long-forgotten part of themselves.

Being small in a big world. Being safe. Being able to be like a child, just to look and feel and letting experiences occur close to you, not having to act from your own account, just letting things happen.The small details and magical things.

The audience feels their bodies, their ears, their skin, all of their senses again. The piece aims to draw attention to all of their senses. To challenge their imaginations, they are given something to taste and they imagine something, they can smell something and imagine something. It makes them go inward somehow. Finding your senses again. A safe, womb-space. Warm and quiet and dark.

Very personal experience, everyone in the audience will have a personal experience. Leaving the performance with something in their mouth, each one different. A taste with a lable attached to it – and orange with ‘what does this sound like’. Noise and heat and power, an force and fire, the sun, heat again, running, fighting, shouting, strength. (B.Fuchs)

Museums, galleries, archives, libraries and media organisations such as publishers and film and broadcast companies, have traditionally mediated and controlled access to cultural resources and knowledge. What is the future of such ‘top-down’ institutions in the age of ‘bottom-up’ access to knowledge and cultural artifacts through Web 2:0 technologies. Will such institutions respond to this threat to their cultural hegemony by resistance or adaptation? How can a museum or a gallery or, for that matter, a broadcasting company, appeal to an audience which has unprecedented access to cultural resources? How can institutions predicated on a cultural economy of scarcity compete in an emerging state of cultural abundance? The twenty-third CHArt conference will reflect upon these issues.

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7000DH – Fukdapolis – Second Theme (2007)

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Overview

The performance focuses on the regenerative aspect of destruction, understood as a process of mutation rather than a form of obliteration. It identifies cultural kitsch as a destructive element within a dematerializing process that creates a noise pool nurturing new patterns of identity and cultural production.

For this performance 7000dirhams has collated a small archive of this kitschified detritus in the form of archetypal melodies, folk and popular music, touristic memorabilia, live radio feeds, to create a rich sludge of source material.

The materials themselves (Super 8mm, souvenir slides and audio recordings), are cut into, burnt, degraded, looped and spliced with a savagery comparable to that embodied by their impoverished representations of a dynamic and living reality.

As such, the work attempts to address the gulf between the image of Athens as presented to the outside world, with that of the everyday, as experienced by Athenians themselves. It therefore presents an environment of plowed structures and splintered forms of Greek culture as filtered by the eyes and ears of two hapless fools from London.

Exhibition & Live entrance: 10 euros. 9pm.
Destroy Athens – Live is a reflection on processes of music & sound production within a visual arts ‘Biennial’ setting. Resisting the notion of ‘art-bands’, Destroy Athens – Live aims instead to describe a phenomenon: that of practitioners operating within different genres (media artists, musicians, film-makes, writers, designers, comic book & soft-toy makers, circuit benders etc) engaging in collaborations, collectives & media experiments that have diverse musical outputs.

From experimental politicised avant-pop commentary, to hip-hop jazz electronica improvisations, to real-time deconstruction & amplification of media, these acts all maintain a commitment to immediacy & non-virtuosity.
The Live part of the public opening engages the Biennial’s theme & purpose (‘Destroy Athens’), by treating Athens as a signal source to be sampled, tweaked with, looped, filtered, commented on and jammed along to. Through the use of on-site found & recorded sound & image, real-time local radio broadcasting interventions, and sonic-surgical media operations, the performers offer a response to context as they find it. Such a grounding for free & open improvisation is a platform for testing their own ignorance of so many aspects of the signal source – cultural, linguistic, historical, while drawing parallels with their own experiences as inhabitants of London, a multi-branded city.

Welcome to the ICMC 07. This is the entrance to the Huset venue where the film program, installations and informal evening concerts were presented.

ICMC Poster Session: Co-presenters demo’ing their own projects. The nature of the shared space was good in as much as it allowed you to engage with the other people’s work, the negative aspects were due to the bleed of sound from one table to another, and the lack of relevance of one work to another. A classic sound art conundrum.

The poster presentations are great forums for demostrating your ideas, and opening up your work to an informed and tech savvy group of international practitioners. We hear sound artist Ellen Moffat adding a few comments about the proceedings.

Cathy Lane introducing the Sound Art and Design Department of LCC in the session of studio reports. LCC came across very well in comparison to the other schools being presented (including Sound and Media Studios at London Metropolitan University, SCRIME at University of Bordeaux, CNMAT at Berkeley, CCRMA at Stanford, and Hanyang University, Korea (presented by Richard Dudas) .

Cathy introduces the specialist areas of the School of Sound Art & Design at the London College of Communication and explains the context.

Cathy discussing the department’s interest in Sound and the Environment with particular regard to field recording and phonography practices.

I had arrived a day early for the Art of Immersive Soundscapes Forum. 8 hours by Greyhound from Winnipeg airport across flat rolling endless prairie. The Empire Hotel. The cheapest place in town. Next door to the liquor store. The room was $25 a night. It hadn’t been changed in 25 years. Everything run down, and battered. A Friday night. Alone in the prairies. I locked myself into my room. I scanned the FM radio frequency to search for company.